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My love/hate relationship with my Xbox One

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My love/hate relationship with my Xbox One Empty My love/hate relationship with my Xbox One

Post by cal_el Thu Oct 29, 2015 11:34 am

My love/hate relationship with my Xbox One MediaHandler
I've had my Xbox One for quite a while now and I have grown to both love and absolutely despise Microsoft's large black box. This is going to be ranty so enjoy!

It does a lot of things right and has great support for a wide variety of none gaming applications. Case and point, I love that I can get into the nitty gritty and fine tune the console's settings for an optimal viewing experience on my TV. Previously I would have to run THX Tune-Up, which requires digging out the right Blu Ray with it on to do it. Now it is just part of my regular fiddling with TV settings cycle when the urge strikes me. 

Kinect is also something both me and the wife enjoy using. Saying something to the TV is for the most part intuitive and responsive and allows you to get to what you want quickly. Sometimes however you can literally be shouting at the TV and it will look at you blankly. And while Kinect is great to get to various apps and games its use within them is mixed at best. 

It is the console I use the most because it is completely wired into my TV/Speaker setup. When the Xbox turns on the TV and Amp turn on. When the Xbox turns off so does everything else. We use it for the majority of our TV and Movie viewing since we cut the cord on traditional TV. Our Apple TV is hooked up to it so we can stream from iTunes and we use Netflix/Amazon/iPlayer/etc. mainly on the Xbox out of ease of use. 

BUT BUT BUT there are problems with it being able to do that.

The amount of times apps like Netflix become unresponsive is maddening. It also does this weird thing when we try to watch Daredevil (and only Daredevil) where the image stutters every thirty seconds or so. Then there is the Blu Ray player app. Which is great 90% of the time but we will occasionally pop in a movie to watch and the sound will be out of sync. Only on the Xbox One. On PS4/PS3 it is fine. 

Then there are the special occasions about once a month were the console decides to completely lock up and requires a hard reset to fix. I'm not doing anything especially taxing but without fail I know at some point I will be stuck on that shitty home screen and the Xbox One will be unresponsive to my commands. There is also an element of little things going wrong with it all the time. Stuff not loading correctly, having to select things multiple times for them to trigger. Minor but annoying stuff.

My love/hate relationship with my Xbox One Xbox_One_Controller_Wide

Gaming wise I hate the controller. The button layout is fine and the triggers are great. I even got used to the crappy shoulder buttons. But Microsoft still insist on it being battery operated unless you buy a separate charge pack. IT'S 2015! FUCK THAT NONSENSE! Also the build quality is poor. I hardly play games on the Xbox One so it is not like I am intensively using the controllers as I browse through Netflix. Yet the casing for one of them has come apart on one side. Then on the other controller the casing is misaligned giving the seam on the left side of the controller a rough edge because it sticks out. Something only noticed well after purchasing the controller. But now that I know it is there it angers me whenever I hold it Laughing

Buying and playing a game is a mess too especially compared to PS4. I always forget that I have to manually trigger a disc install for a game. I put Halo 5 in the console two days ago thinking it would install and download all the updates it needed so it would be ready to play when I got round to it.... I have now been sat here for nearly an hour waiting for it to install once I told it install the game. On PS4 you put the disc in, it starts downloading the latest patches and installs the initial payload of the game automatically, then the rest is done in the background so you can get playing relatively quickly. You'd think with its three operating systems the Xbox One would have similar functionality but that is a fools dream apparently. 

Digital games are also a mess too. The Xbox Live Store was a breeze to navigate on the 360 on the Xbox One it is a hive of submenus where if you select the wrong thing you can end up back at the start of the process or completely lost. Selecting a game to play is also three menus deep from the home screen. You can get around this with pinning things but the longer I have owned the console the clearer it has become that Pins were implemented because they knew they built a terrible UI. The Windows 10 update is meant to fix a lot of the gripes I have but I get the feeling that shit is still going to be broken. 

As for the games themselves I have for the most part really enjoyed them. Due to the Xbox One's lack of power it is my secondary console for games with me buying the majority of third party games on PS4. So the Xbox is an exclusives only machine. So while Microsoft's exclusive output is not as robust as Sony's they put a lot of effort and money behind them. So I do have this interesting thing where I hardly play games on my Xbox One but when I do I know I am almost certainly guaranteed a good time. So I guess that makes the overall frustration I have with the machine worth it. Its always about the games but it is just a shame that the experience around them is such a borked mess. 

Rant over.

PS. In the time it has taken me to think of this post, write it, edit it and then tweak it Halo 5 still hasn't finished installing..... Rolling Eyes
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Post by megablast16 Thu Oct 29, 2015 6:05 pm

I've been using mine a lot more lately after months of it gathering dust but I still wouldn't describe it as a joy to use, I already know the PS4 will be by main console this gen. Agree with a lot of what you say cal, especially installing games. Basically MS just screwed it up virtually from day one, in trying to make it the box that can do everything it ended up doing nothing particularly well. That's the legacy of the regime that was in charge when it was designed and it will have to live with it all this generation, firmware updates can only do so much. Back to the drawing board with the next Xbox I think.
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Post by MarkySharky Thu Oct 29, 2015 6:44 pm

To cut a long story short, I don't really agree with any of your complaints or had any of the issues you've mentioned. 

The only thing I would kinda agree on is the general build quality of the Xbox controller. Only the 'handles' though. Otherwise the controller is superior in every way. 

I'll take using a separate battery pack over the abysmal PS4 controller battery life thanks.
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Post by cal_el Thu Oct 29, 2015 10:32 pm

MarkySharky wrote:To cut a long story short, I don't really agree with any of your complaints or had any of the issues you've mentioned. 

The only thing I would kinda agree on is the general build quality of the Xbox controller. Only the 'handles' though. Otherwise the controller is superior in every way. 

I'll take using a separate battery pack over the abysmal PS4 controller battery life thanks.
Maybe I've just had a string of bad luck with my Xbox One. But you have to admit that at the moment the UI is a mess. Just thought of another problem, which is in part down to me hardly using the feature, but I have had to google 'redeem code Xbox One' on multiple occasions because I can never find it.  Laughing

Like I said I'm hoping the upcoming update fixes a lot of problems I have with the console but I'm not holding out too much hope.
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Post by MarkySharky Thu Oct 29, 2015 11:25 pm

The UI isn't perfect but is the PS4 any better? Not really. 

I'm in the Xbox preview programme and the new UI is better.
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Post by Wolvieware Fri Oct 30, 2015 12:53 am

I'm not a X1 owner as you guys know, and this has been insteresting.

I have two points too make after reading Cal's post.

I agree about the UI. I hated the last menu update on 360, and thought it was horrible. What I have seen and used of X1 made me think it has got even worse. I got horribly lost, and couldn't work out what any of the tiles were actually for, if they were adverts, if it would play a game...This probably improves over time as you get used to it, but the Xbox menu is one of the biggest reasons I started to go off the 360.

I disagree with your comment on Xbox exclusive games not being as robust though. I look over longingly at the Xbox exclusives and wish I could play them. There's far more games on the Xbox at the moment then there are on PS4. There's stuff in the pipeline for PS, but the Xbox has it now, and more coming. It's Sony's weak point right now.

One other note, I really detest the game boxes the discs come in now, with the disc holder on the left when you open the case. Just...why?! Why change that from the right? That annoys me.
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Post by megablast16 Fri Oct 30, 2015 6:24 am

MarkySharky wrote:The UI isn't perfect but is the PS4 any better? Not really. 

I'm in the Xbox preview programme and the new UI is better.

The XB1 UI is probably my biggest bug bear with it. I've never liked it, messy, confusing to find things and sluggish, the PS4 UI is way better imo. I've never had trouble finding the redeem code section though like cal, just select games in the store section and it's the bottom option on the left hand side of the screen, just like on PS4 actually. As you say though it's about to be revamped so hopefully that will improve things a lot.
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Post by cal_el Fri Oct 30, 2015 7:30 am

Wolvieware wrote:One other note, I really detest the game boxes the discs come in now, with the disc holder on the left when you open the case. Just...why?! Why change that from the right? That annoys me.
I get confused every time I open a game! Laughing

megablast16 wrote:
MarkySharky wrote:The UI isn't perfect but is the PS4 any better? Not really. 

I'm in the Xbox preview programme and the new UI is better.

The XB1 UI is probably my biggest bug bear with it. I've never liked it, messy, confusing to find things and sluggish, the PS4 UI is way better imo. I've never had trouble finding the redeem code section though like cal, just select games in the store section and it's the bottom option on the left hand side of the screen, just like on PS4 actually. As you say though it's about to be revamped so hopefully that will improve things a lot.

Yeah like I said it is me mainly not having to use that particular option regularly. I think I keep wrongly assuming it should be on the surface level store menu.
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Post by cal_el Mon Nov 02, 2015 3:05 pm

In a twist of fate most likely brought about by karma for complaining about my Xbox One, over the weekend on of my PS4 controllers has gone insane! It keeps thinking I am pressing up and L1 no matter what I do!
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